The present invention relates to a data management system which stores and manages data using a computer system.
In various kinds of businesses, large amounts of data are produced in developing, designing and manufacturing products. In order to effectively utilize such data as a development resource, it is necessary to efficiently store and manage the data.
For example, for a semiconductor device, various steps are required including a developing step, a designing step, a manufacturing step and a testing step. In the steps, operations are performed using operating tools including independent computer systems.
A data management system manages various data produced by the operating tools as development resources. In particular, data of various forms produced by different operating tools are stored once into the individual operating tools, and in order to allow re-utilization of the data, the data are registered and stored as development resources into a management tool including a management computer system.
The individual tools are located at different places from one another, and are different from one another in operation data type and form. The data stored by such operating tools are manually extracted from the operating tools into recording media, and the recording media are transported to the management tool. The management tool reads the recorded contents of the recording media and registers and stores the data as development resources.
To the individual development resources, arbitrary keywords are set. Each keyword includes numerical value information set in a corresponding relationship to, for example, a particular word, and when a development resource is re-utilized, the keywords in the development resources are identified as corresponding numerical information.
Updating of the individual keywords is performed by updating the numerical value information corresponding to the keywords of each group of the development resources of the same types produced by the individual working tools.
The data management system registers the data produced by the individual operating tools as development resources into the management tool by manual operation of an operator. Accordingly, the registration operation is complicated, and there is the possibility that omission in registration may occur.
Further, for each group of development resources of the same type, information corresponding to the arbitrary keyword is updated collectively using the management tool. However, it is impossible to collectively update a common keyword in the development resources of different types. Therefore, it is necessary to retrieve various development resources registered in the management tool to extract a keyword which is present in development resources of a same type and collectively update the extracted keyword.
Accordingly, since updating operation of a keyword must be performed for each group of development resources of the same type, the operation is complicated, and there is the possibility of omission in updating for a common keyword between development resources of different types.
Further, the updating operation is performed also for the keywords of a group of development resources which do not require updating. Therefore, updating of a keyword is performed individually for each development resource. In this case, there is a problem in that a large number of development resources may have different updating histories, making management of the updating operation complicated.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a data management system which readily and accurately updates and manages keywords included in a large number of development resources of different types.
Briefly stated, the present invention provides a data management system including: a data input unit for inputting input data; an operation unit connected to the data input unit for performing a predetermined operation using the input data to produce a plurality of different type data files, each including a keyword; a first storage unit for storing the plurality of different type data files; a second storage unit for storing the keywords of the plurality of data files; a third storage unit for storing location information of the individual keywords included in the individual data files; and an arithmetic unit for receiving a keyword from said second storage unit and updating the keyword included in the plurality of different type data files based on the location information stored in said third storage unit.
Other aspects and advantages of the invention will become apparent from the following description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, illustrating by way of example the principles of the invention.